Karadzic denies he masterminded killings

Bosnian Serb leader’s defense opens

By Mike Corder -
Associated Press -
Tuesday, October 16, 2012

THE HAGUE — Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic cast himself as a “mild man, a tolerant man” as he opened his defense Tuesday in his long-running genocide trial, claiming he tried to prevent fighting and then worked to reduce casualties in the bloody 1992-95 Bosnian war.

His claims brought snorts of derision and cries of “He’s lying! He’s lying!” from some Muslim survivors of the war who were watching the trial from the public gallery at the U.N. tribunal.

Mr. Karadzic, who faces charges including genocide and crimes against humanity, was given 90 minutes to make a statement on his role in the war, which left an estimated 100,000 dead. The statement was not made under oath, meaning Mr. Karadzic could not be cross-examined by prosecutors.

In another of the tribunal’s courtrooms, Goran Hadzic, a former leader of rebel Serbs in Croatia, became the last of the tribunal’s 161 indicted suspects to face justice as his trial got under way.

He was arrested last year in northern Serbia after more than seven years on the run, and pleaded not guilty to charges of murdering hundreds of Croats and expelling tens of thousands more.

Mr. Karadzic, a former psychologist and poet, told judges he is a “physician and literary man” who was a reluctant player in the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. He said that before the war, many of his friends, including his hairdresser, were Muslims.

“Instead of being accused of the events in our war, I should be rewarded for all the good things I have done,” he said through a court interpreter. “I did everything humanly possible to avoid the war. I succeeded in reducing the suffering of all civilians.”

Prosecutors have painted a starkly different picture of Mr. Karadzic during months of witness testimony, portraying him as a political leader who masterminded Serb atrocities throughout the war, from campaigns of persecution and murder of Muslims and Croats early in 1992 to the conflict’s bloody climax, the 1995 massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the U.N.-protected Srebrenica enclave.

Mr. Karadzic, 67, who looked relaxed and cheerful in court as he read his statement from a text, denied that prosecution portrait of him.

“Everybody who knows me knows I am not an autocrat, I am not aggressive, I am not intolerant,” he told judges. “On the contrary, I am a mild man, a tolerant man with great capacity to understand others.”

He also said some of the worst atrocities of the war, including two deadly shelling attacks on a Sarajevo marketplace in 1994 and 1995, were “orchestrated” to turn public opinion against Serbs.

Mr. Karadzic said Sarajevo was his adopted home and that “every shell that fell on Sarajevo hurt me personally.”

He called the first marketplace shelling a “shameless orchestration.”

“Obviously some people got killed by that explosion, but we also saw mannequins being thrown onto trucks, creating this show for the world,” he said.

The first defense witness Mr. Karadzic called, retired Russian Col. Andrey Demurenko, who investigated the second attack, also cast doubt on who fired the deadly mortars into crowds of shoppers.